Sunday, 25 October 2015

On Kentridge at Marian Goodman, London, with some notes on Frieze

not for sale at Frieze, courtesy VnA

Of course, without a doubt, Frieze Masters is a wonderful show and fills me with an insatiable and unrequitable greed. I wrote once before about it, I'll append the piece here, see the end of this. But the exercise of this greed is such a relief from other, more orderly responses to the main show in itself (critique, distance) and the things in it and how they are shown. At Masters I hungrily accumulate walls-full of Ivon Hitchens and other British landscape painters of that kind, alongside the odd cubist Severini and a couple of Schiele drawing, a row of Mary Martin reliefs. Why not? I like that stuff a lot and almost indiscriminately; a North German, dismal and vicious little altar piece, carved or painted, of the 1480s, would add a little truth of European history to the muted-sublime escapism of my irreproachably middle class taste. In the end the glory of Masters is that you stumble on images without curating, ordering and judgements made other than by the catching of your eye.

Yet, when I come to the nearby stands showing Sekulla and Goldblatt, why would I buy them? Why would anyone buy them here? To put up on one's Mayfair or Monte or Santa Fe or Moscow dining room wall to remind one to be angry when one looks up from one or another super-food? (idiot idea, no, super-food?) To stop one sleeping? Or for their self-evident beauty, their now almost pastoral recall of a lost epoch of appropriate anger(s) and empathies? Steve Edwards, in his little book of Martha Rosler's Bowery makes this important reading of the ambivalence of an engaged art that ineluctably fuses an exquisite form with anger, passing time and loss.

So with the Kentridge: the problem with Kentridge is this, that in inventing a new medium, a fusing of the hand made mark with the pixel in movement, in still, or with the anamorphic mirror in a literal virtualising of the mark, he gave rise to something in itself exquisite, and excitation to visual greed, as much as the Martins or the Sotos and Frieze, and, moreover, it always seems to work. So at one level the Goodman show is ravishing, stimulating, a bulimia of visual pleasures. But what of the ideas? What do the words do to his medium, his (it is only his, a singular medium) medium to the words and musics? The repeated Mao slogans that become minor puns, the sub-intensive satirising of right-feeling?

They produce a sense of gentle wisdom, the wisdom of the prematurely old and wise, but the name for this wisdom is, otherwise, Alain de Botton, AKA KITSCH at the very structural level of thinking. Grand parades round huge spaces, bloated and overblown gestures and borrowed politics from distant sources (Paris Commune references for example, to point to some everydayness in catastrophe).

The contradiction of Kentridge's work, that once I admired to a certain extent, but of which the decline is disastrously instantiated in the infinite kitsch of the Winterreise 'project', is that is power of seduction, at the level of its sublimely satisfying medium or material, has become the very measure of its hollowness. Like advertising; neither anger nor pleasure in the end; just fatigue, in the finding of free space, space free from all of that, the same wasting effect, in the end, as Frieze.

Waiting
for Frieze, (2009?) for the late WOUND MAGAZINE, commissioned by Ken Pratt

Writing
on Frieze for Wound, for Wound on Frieze, it sounds like saying the same

thing
twice, twice times the luxury edition, does it make two or is it nothing more

than
one? Luxury squared = luxury and nothing more, one VIP is as good as

another.
There is a difference. mind you. Wound does not have to try to be more